Emergency department (ED) crowding has been identified by the Institute of Medicine as a public health problem. It is caused by episodes of supply-demand mismatch within EDs that result in long waiting times to be seen, for critical treatments, and for inpatient bed placement. Recent studies have demonstrated that crowding has a negative impact on critical outcomes of care, such as complication rates and mortality. Solutions are needed at the ED, hospital, community and national policy levels to reduce crowding and mitigate the impact of crowding on quality and outcomes. This grant application seeks funding for the 2011 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference titled, "Interventions to Assure Quality in the Crowded ED," which will take place on June 1, 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts. The overall objective of this conference will be to develop a research agenda that identifies promising interventions to safeguard the quality of emergency care during crowded periods and reduce ED crowding altogether through system-wide solutions. This goal will be achieved through three separate objectives: 1) review interventions that have been implemented to reduce crowding and summarize the evidence of their effectiveness on the delivery of emergency care, 2) identify strategies within or outside of the healthcare setting (i.e. policy, engineering, operations management, system design etc.) that may help reduce crowding or improve the quality of emergency care provided during episodes of ED crowding, and 3) identify the most appropriate design and analytic techniques for rigorously evaluating ED interventions designed to reduce crowding or improve the quality of emergency care provided during episodes of ED crowding. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This grant seeks funding for the 2011 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference, which is titled, "Interventions to Assure Quality in the Crowded Emergency Department (ED)." The objective of this conference is to develop a research agenda that identifies promising interventions to safeguard the quality of emergency care during crowded periods and reduce ED crowding altogether through system-wide solutions.